A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  If there was any hope for a revival of the movement, it lay with Spain. The union of Castile and Aragon proved to be permanent, if imperfect, and this new power was embarking on an expansionist foreign policy which drew not only on the military expertise built up during the Granada war, but also on the convergence of religious and patriotic fervour which had characterized it. The papacy contributed towards the latter by constantly issuing fresh grants of clerical taxes and renewing the bula de la cruzada. As early as 1415 the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in Morocco had been treated as a crusade, and a flow of further Portuguese conquests in the western Maghrib in the fifteenth century benefited in the same manner. Soon after Granada was secure the Castilians imitated their western neighbours, commencing a spectacular drive into Algeria and Tunisia. By 1510 they had reached Tripoli and were preparing for an assault on Tunis. They were half-way to their stated objective of Jerusalem. This may seem like propaganda or at best self-delusion, but it was fully in keeping with the mystical and eschatological tone which is frequently visible during the Granada war, and which shaped the thinking of Christopher Columbus and the Franciscan missionaries in the New World. In practice, however, this surge eastwards brought the Castilians into collision with the Ottomans and their clients, the North African emirs and corsairs. Thus the Iberian crusade merged with the anti-Turkish crusade in the central Maghrib.

  At this point it seemed inevitable that the papally-directed international crusade would be superseded by the state-directed national crusade epitomized by Spain’s campaigns against the Moors. But the election of Charles of Spain as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 brought about what looks like a brief revival of the older tradition. Charles V had to perform a difficult balancing act between furthering Castile’s interests in North Africa and carrying out his imperial responsibilities in central and eastern Europe. Initially, the latter entailed assisting Hungary, and after Hungary’s collapse in 1526 it meant the defence of the Reich itself against the Ottomans. The emperor worked in close if abrasive co-operation with the pope, who constantly reminded him of his many duties, and his territories were so extensive and varied that at times it seems as if his crusades, particularly his relief of Vienna in 1529 and his great expedition to Tunis in 1535, were akin to those of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Charles saw himself as a new Barbarossa or Charlemagne; indeed, the celebration of the victory at Tunis as the triumph of Rome over Carthage points to even older traditions of imperial warfare. But this is illusory, for Charles was always defending his own lands or dynastic interests, with the use of his own troops and funds, even if the former were encouraged and the latter boosted by crusading measures. The crusading status of Charles’s conflicts is undeniable, but as Francis I and other enemies of the emperor were quick to point out, they were ‘Habsburg crusades’, fought for particularist ends.

  By the time Charles V marched in relief of Vienna Christendom was split by its confessional divide. In the Lutheran, and later Calvinist, states of the North the rejection both of papal authority and of the sacrament of penance which underpinned crusade indulgences, effectively extinguished crusading. Arguably this was little more than the formal ending of a practice which had become residual in any case. The closingdown of the Lithuanian front in the early fifteenth century and the failure of all plans for a general crusade against the Ottoman Turks meant that relatively few families in England, the Low Countries, or Germany had directly experienced crusading for some generations, unless their members entered the Order of St John, became papal preachers and tax collectors, or went as individuals or in groups to fight in Granada, Hungary, or Rhodes. There were more of the latter than one might expect, such as the 2,000 or so Burgundians who set out from Sluys in 1464 with the intention of fighting on Pius II’s crusade—en route, they stopped off at Ceuta and helped the Portuguese to repel a Moorish attack—or the 1,500 English archers whom Henry VIII sent to Cadiz in 1511 to take part in King Ferdinand’s planned Tunis crusade. But they were not enough to keep the tradition healthy. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that crusading had come to occupy a rather small corner of the rich fabric of Catholic culture which the reformers destroyed.

  Of equal importance was the fact that its image had become disreputable and its resonances negative. This is nowhere more apparent than in Erasmus’s contribution to the long series of crusade treatises, his Consultatio de bello Turcis inferendo of 1530. Writing at the time of Hungary’s dismemberment and in the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman siege of Vienna, Erasmus most unwillingly supported a war against the Turks: ‘I do not advise against war, but to the best of my ability I urge that it be undertaken and pursued auspiciously.’ This meant that Christendom’s secular authorities should fight altruistically, and the troops in a spirit of penitence, like the early Templars as described by St Bernard. The conflict should be financed by cutting superfluous court expenditures, ‘spending in piety what they take away from extravagance’, and by voluntary donations, for ‘the people’s suspicion will be eroded as plans mature into action’. Above all there should be no preaching of indulgences, which were associated with failure, dissimulation, and shabby ‘fixes’ between the pope and local rulers, and no participation by the Church. ‘For it is neither seemly, nor in accordance with holy scripture or the laws of the Church, for cardinals, bishops, abbots, or priests to get involved with these matters; and to this day their involvement has never met with success.’ This was no longer crusading, rather a purged form of Christian warfare rising phoenix-like from the ashes of old, discredited structures.

  Erasmus criticized Luther in the Consultatio for condemning the anti-Turkish war outright on the grounds that the Turks were sent by God to punish Christians for their sins. In fact Luther had abandoned this extreme Augustinian stance by this point, for much the same reasons that Erasmus gave his highly-qualified approval for a secular war of defence; whatever their theological views, no reformers could bear the thought of actually living under Ottoman rule. Up to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 Germany’s Lutheran princes fought alongside their emperor against the Turks, extracting valuable concessions on the religious issue as the price of their assistance. Even after it became clear that the confessional divide was more than a temporary aberration, military co-operation between German Protestants and Catholics against the Turks, like the survival of the Teutonic Order in the northern states, was a sign that things were less clear-cut than they appeared to be. Catholic victories in the Mediterranean were celebrated in the Protestant countries and a sense of common values, some either religious or derived from religion, persisted. Politically and culturally, the Turks were still ‘alien’: Protestant alliances with them against the Catholic powers were kept secret for fear of offending public opinion. Old feelings and beliefs were not to be discarded overnight.

  However, it was in the South that the forms and attitudes of crusading persisted, and the length of time for which they endured has in recent years finally received due recognition. The sixteenth century witnessed the culmination of the practice of forming naval leagues against the Turks, which had its humble origins in the 1330s. A league consisting of Charles V, Venice, and the pope was formed in 1538, but it suffered a serious defeat at Prevéza, off the west coast of Greece. This failure, the recriminations which it caused, and the political differences between the contracting powers, prevented the formation of another league until the struggle for naval control of the central Mediterranean had reached its climax in the late 1560s. The Turkish capture of Tunis in 1569 and Nicosia in 1570 enabled Pope Pius V to persuade both Spain and Venice to enter another league. On 7 October 1571 its galleys won the biggest naval battle of the century at Lepanto, in the gulf of Corinth. The Catholic fleet at Lepanto was financed largely by church taxes and the sale of indulgences. Those who fought were conscious of the significance of the engagement and, in accounts published very soon afterwards, they were depicted preparing themselves for action in a spirit of piety, penitence, and forgiveness which would have earned
Erasmus’s approval and would not have seemed unfamiliar to St Louis. Indeed, the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation accommodated with ease many of the devotional practices of crusading, as well as making its principal institutions acceptable by modifying them. In 1562 Duke Cosimo I of Florence even founded a new military order, the Knights of Santo Stefano, which is described in Chapter 13.

  As was to be expected, it was in Habsburg Spain that the crusade flourished most during the Counter-Reformation. The degree of institutional continuity here was remarkable, with less reform than elsewhere. It was most visible in the prominent role which the Spanish military orders continued to occupy in society, despite the abuses practised by a crown which used its control of the orders to milk their offices and lands for all they were worth. Then there was the regular preaching of the bula de la cruzada on behalf of the Turkish war and the collection of the subsidio, a church tax which was clearly descended from the clerical tenth, although it had come to assume far greater proportions. The presence of such legacies from Spain’s crusading past was rationalized in terms of its crusading present, for whatever the concerns of the popes about Spanish aggrandizement, there could be no doubt that the wars which Philip II was waging in the Mediterranean, the Maghrib, and the Low Countries had the effect of maintaining the Catholic faith. Thus when he granted the king a totally new form of levy on church revenues, the excusado, in 1567, Pius V justified it by reference to Philip’s expenses ‘for the preservation and defence of the Christian religion’ in Flanders and the Mediterranean. The pope’s renewal of the bula de la cruzada, too, despite the fact it contravened the reforming decrees of the council of Trent, came about in 1571 as the price which Philip II attached to his joining the Holy League.

  The survival to such a pronounced degree of crusading practices in Spain is explained by the conservatism of Church and society and, above all, by the link between state finances and crusade revenues which dated back at least to the Granada war. Profits drawn from the military orders, the cruzada, and the subsidio made up about two-thirds of the two million ducats which an informed commentator at Rome estimated in 1566 as Philip II’s annual haul from the Spanish Church. This may make us suspicious about the king’s constant assertions that he was engaged in the pursuit of God’s cause. His biographers, however, tend to be convinced of his sincerity. Moreover, many of the numerous comments made in the sixteenth century to the effect that Spain’s wars were those of God originated not at governmental level but in sources which cannot be construed as propagandistic in intent. Accounts of the exploits of conquistadores, the memoirs of Spanish soldiers, and contemporary letters and histories about the fighting in the Mediterranean and the Low Countries, as well as the Armada of 1588, expound common themes. The Spanish were God’s chosen people, the new Israelites; they were extending the faith by conversion in the New World and defending it by force of arms in the old one; their successes were providential. It followed that their soldiers who fell were guaranteed a place in heaven. Before the battle of Steenbergen in 1583, for example, Alexander Farnese reportedly encouraged his troops by assuring them that they would win ‘a fair victory over the enemies of the Catholic religion, of your king and mine; this is the day on which Jesus Christ will make you all immortal and place you in the ranks of the chosen.’

  This association of crusading with Habsburg foreign policy, with the idealized self-perception of Spain’s military class, and more generally with Spanish national feeling, was the most significant expression of the survival of the crusade, albeit in radically altered form, in the Catholic South. But it was not the only one. In Chapter 13 it will be shown that the Hospitallers carried the history of the military orders through into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by their participation in the continuing struggle against the Turks in the Mediterranean. The survival in the same period of crusade indulgences and church taxes is less well documented but undoubtedly occurred, for example during the Veneto-Ottoman struggle for Crete (1645–69), the second siege of Vienna (1683), and the Holy League of 1684–97. There is for historians of the crusades a fascination in tracking down ever-later examples of crusade preaching, individuals assuming the cross, and grants of indulgences for fighting, and more generally in tracing the expression of crusading ideas and sentiments into modern times. This fascination is easily understood and it forms a legitimate field of enquiry, so long as we accept that the crusading movement, with its connotations not just of acquiescence but of broad-based popularity and support, had long since come to an end.

  12

  The Latin East

  1291–1669

  PETER EDBURY

  THE Mamluk conquest of Acre and the other Frankish-held cities and fortresses in 1291 marked the end of a western presence in Syria and Palestine that had its origins in the First Crusade. But elsewhere in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, Latin rule persisted. The kingdom of Cyprus, established in the 1190s in the aftermath of the Third Crusade, survived as the most easterly of these western possessions until the Turkish conquest of 1571. In Greece and the Aegean, in the area that contemporaries often conveniently referred to as ‘Romania’, several of the regimes that had come into being in the early years of the thirteenth century after the conquest of Constantinople by the army of the Fourth Crusade continued to hold sway. The Frankish princes of Achaea and dukes of Athens between them ruled much of southern Greece; Italians held Negroponte and many of the smaller Aegean islands, while the Venetian republic governed Crete and the southern Greek ports of Coron and Modon. Though the Latins had lost Constantinople itself in 1261, in the fourteenth century western Europeans were able to add to the territories in the Aegean under their control, with Rhodes and Chios the most notable of these later acquisitions.

  During the thirteenth century the most potent threat to continued Latin rule in Romania had come from the Greeks of Nicaea or Epiros. But after 1300, as Byzantine power waned, so, as we have seen, the threat from the Turks came to the fore. The close of the thirteenth century saw the emergence of the Turkish warlord in north-western Asia Minor named Osman. As has already been described, his descendants, the Ottoman sultans, were in due course to overrun all these Latin possessions as well as the Byzantine empire, the Balkans, the other Turkish emirates of Asia Minor, the Mamluk sultanate, and more besides. In the seventeenth century, with the conquest of Crete from the Venetians, the Ottomans brought the history of western rule in the territories won during or after the crusades to the East to a close. Iraklion, the principal city of Crete, surrendered to the Turks in 1669, and despite the fact that Venetian garrisons were able to remain in a few other places in the island until 1715 and Venetian-led troops had spectacular though short-lived successes in Greece in the 1680s, the fall of Iraklion can be regarded as marking the end of an epoch.

  War against the Turks, however, is only one of several themes that criss-cross the history of the western-ruled lands in the eastern Mediterranean during these centuries. Conflicts among the Latins themselves and between the Latins and the other Christian rulers, the Byzantine emperors and the kings of Cilician Armenia, are also prominent. More particularly, the forms that western government and society might take, the relevance to the Latin-ruled territories of commerce between East and West, and the vexed question of the extent to which the Latin regimes can be labelled ‘colonial’ and can be seen as prefiguring European colonial experiences elsewhere from the sixteenth century onwards are all topics that deserve attention. Throughout the Latin East people of western European extraction ruled over an indigenous population that was predominantly Greek in speech and in religious affiliation. How this underclass fared at the hands of the dominant minority is another subject of considerable interest. But before alighting on a few of these issues, a sketch of the political history of these disparate territories is called for, if only to provide a chronological framework within which to consider them.

  The Kingdom of Cyprus

  At the time of the fall of Acre the kings of the Lus
ignan dynasty had been ruling in Cyprus for a century. Many of the original Frankish settlers were, like the members of the royal house itself, people who had been dispossessed by Saladin’s conquests of 1187–8, and the arrival of many more refugees from Latin Syria during the course of the thirteenth century had had the effect of reinforcing the Latin position in the island. Since 1269 the kings of Cyprus had also laid claim to the title of king of Jerusalem, even though their right to do so had been contested by the Angevin kings of Sicily. However, in 1291 it was the then Cypriot king, Henry II (1286–1324), who had had possession of Acre and who had done what little he could to withstand the Mamluk assault.

  Henry never completely lost sight of the idea that he might some day recover the kingdom of Jerusalem. He made some serious if in the event ineffectual attempts to co-operate with Ghazan, the Mongol ilkhan of Persia, during the latter’s invasions of Syria in 1299–1301; he attempted, again ineffectually, to enforce the embargo on western ships trading in Mamluk ports in the hope of weakening the sultanate economically and so making a Christian reconquest feasible, and on at least two occasions he sent memoranda to the pope on how a crusade to recover the Holy Land might be conducted. But there was no crusade to restore Christian rule in Jerusalem, and, even if there had been, Henry himself was scarcely in a position to profit by it. Any major expedition to the East at the beginning of the fourteenth century would have been led by the French, and, if successful, would almost certainly have established French or Angevin rule in the Holy Land. In the last decade of his life Henry was building up dynastic ties with the royal house of Aragon, the Angevins’ principal rival in the Mediterranean, but to no effect. In any case he had shown himself to be inadequate as a ruler. A baronial coup d’état led by his brother, Amalric lord of Tyre, in 1306 resulted in his suspension from power, and in 1310 he was sent into exile in Cilician Armenia. On Amalric’s death later that year Henry resumed his rule, but the legacy of this episode was renewed hostility with the Genoese and frosty relations with the Armenians. In other words, the king became embroiled in quarrels with the most powerful of the Italian mercantile republics in the East and with the only other Christian kingdom in the vicinity of his own realm.